Tony Award-winning comic Barry Humphries, internationally famend for his garish stage persona Dame Edna Everage, a condescending and imperfectly-veiled snob whose evolving character has delighted audiences over seven a long time, has died. He was 89.
His demise was confirmed Saturday by the Sydney hospital the place he spent a number of days with issues following hip surgical procedure.
Humphries had lived in London for many years and returned to native Australia in December for Christmas.
He advised The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper final month that his physiotherapy had been “agony” following his fall and hip substitute.
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“It was essentially the most ridiculous factor, like all home incidents are. I used to be reaching for a e-book, my foot acquired caught on a rug or one thing, and down I went,” Humphries stated of his fall.
Humphries has remained an lively entertainer, touring Britain final 12 months along with his one-man present “The Man Behind the Masks.”
The character of Dame Edna started as a dowdy Mrs. Norm Everage, who first took to the stage in Humphries’ hometown of Melbourne within the mid-Fifties. She mirrored a postwar suburban inertia and cultural blandness that Humphries discovered stifling.
Edna is one in every of Humphries’ a number of enduring characters. The subsequent most well-known is Sir Les Patterson, an ever-drunk, matted and lecherous Australian cultural attache.
Patterson mirrored a notion of Australia as a Western cultural wasteland that drove Humphries together with many main Australian intellectuals to London.
Humphries, a regulation college dropout, discovered main success as an actor, author and entertainer in Britain within the Seventies, however the US was an ambition that he discovered stubbornly elusive.
A excessive level in the US was a Tony Award in 2000 for his Broadway present “Dame Edna: The Royal Tour.”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese paid tribute to the celebrated comic.
“For 89 years, Barry Humphries entertained us via a galaxy of personas, from Dame Edna to Sandy Stone,” Albanese tweeted, referring to the aged Stone, one in every of Humphries most enduring characters. “However the brightest star in that galaxy was all the time Barry. An awesome wit, satirist, author and an absolute one-of-kind, he was each gifted and a present.”
British comic Ricky Gervais tweeted: “Farewell, Barry Humphries, you comedy genius.”
Piers Morgan, British tv persona, additionally paid tribute. “One of many funniest folks I’ve ever met,” Morgan tweeted.
“A wondrously clever, entertaining, daring, provocative, mischievous comedy Genius,” Morgan added.
Married 4 occasions, he’s survived by his spouse Lizzie Spender and 4 kids.
© 2023 The Canadian Press
